You may have noticed that I like a nice metaphor. Here comes this week’s!
I’ve been editing for the past couple of weeks. It’s true what they say - it’s easier to edit with a little bit of distance between author and novel. I’ve left it aside for a few months and it makes me more willing to make the hard decisions to cut out the unnecessary fat that gets in the way of a story. It seems to be following the 10% reduction rule of its own accord. It becomes strangely liberating in a way, once I get used to letting go of those precious phrases that don’t really belong.
However …
There is a danger. I’m intensely careful of stripping the prose back too much, to some mundane, bland, anonymous thriller style that could be the output of any ghost writer. That brings me to my metaphor. Ask any chef - a little fat gives the dish more flavor in the cooking.
Previously, I bemoaned technology’s shrinking of attention spans and shrinking of the book form.
Size isn’t everything; there are greater threats for the book out there.
Prescient to this article is a hot debate that broke out on Litopia this week about copyright infringement on the internet. Copyright infringement could be the greatest single contributing factor to the demise of the book. The demise I talk of (as in Part 1) is the loss of cultural significance of the book and the loss of its artistic merit in general.
Here’s how it happens. Forgive me, but I’m going replicate one of my Litopia posts here, where it is openly accessible:
Copyright is the consequence of mass distribution technologies that began with the printing press. A world without copyright means the end of the profession of writer. Without copyright there is no legal mechanism to enable monetization of artistic effort. It leaves the world filled with only amateur artists, or with potential artists who opted never to create in the first place because the time demands are too great, and the bills have to be paid.
What this would mean for the quality of artistic output in general … I think you can guess.
This is why defending copyright is so important.
If writing a damned good book becomes no longer financially viable then fewer people will make the effort to hone their craft up to publication quality. Case in point: this week, I saw one lulu.com self-publisher advertising the book with a banner ad proudly stating that it “may be the worst novel ever!” Inept art now carries with it a badge of merit! Kudos for the marketing nouse in grabbing attention with that one, but trashing your own artistic merit as a starting point, proving that selling the book is more important than what’s between the covers, says more that I ever could about where all this is going.
In a world created by copyright pirates, fewer people still will bother writing at all. So fewer artists emerge, and the quality of available books diminish.
Alternative models of reimbursement won’t help the craft much either, because the book then becomes a vehicle to sell something other than itself. How many of us, of a certain age and older, have seen the instances of quality television programming decrease over the decades because TV programmes have transformed into something little more than scaffolding to support their advertising output?
Payment of artists is the measure of how a culture values art. If we’re no longer willing to pay for it, but just want it all for free, then what does that say about the place of art in our society?
There is no conclusion yet. The publishing industry is in such flux now that even Nostradamus himself would have difficulty seeing the outcome to all this. The conclusion will only reveal itself in its own good time - in the future. For the present, writers and publishers need to stay vigilant … and defend our beloved little story book form … lest we sleepwalk into a world where it is no more.
I hope all this talk of “art” doesn’t sound pretentious. Art and business always make uncomfortable bedfellows. But these things do matter, and if not - they should - and we need to remind ourselves and others why.
With Amazon launching the Kindle 2, and sneaking Kindle ebook reader software onto the iPhone, it seems a good time to take the temperature of world opinion on the future of the book form that we celebrate so confidently this day.
Is the poor little book losing its cultural identity or - worse - its cultural significance?
What would The Lord of the Rings have become if Tolkien’s publisher’s son had said, “Yes, I love it Dad, and I think you should publish it … but I think he should rephrase it in 140 characters tweets that could fit on my iPhone screen.”
I fear the day when just such editorial demands will be made of authors. My feelings on the prevalent page-turning sentence fragment editorial thriller style is already documented, but how much more destructive will it be for the form when the dictates of the technology determine the style of the writing or - heaven-forbid - the form of the story? How can anything of significance or importance be constructed on such miniscule real-estate? Perhaps, as Doctorow hints, the internet and small-screen eReaders will cause a new renaissance of poetry.
Two years ago I started this blog and with it my journey towards the publishing world. The most important thing I have learned is that the publishing industry is changing - rapidly. Technological shifts combined with recessionary pressures are altering the publishing business of old. My publishing research coalesces my future approach to writing projects and even as I write this, it leaves me wondering am I getting this writing thing all wrong? Should I be reinventing myself as the world’s first haiku cyber-novelist instead?
Perhaps not.
The transformation of the book form may not be all bad. There is hope, but … I’m running out of the necessary cyber-spatial real-estate to complete my point. I’ve kept you here long enough and there are, no doubt, several important tweets demanding your attention at this very moment.
So tune in next time, brave reader, for the concluding bite-sized installment of “The Death of the Book”.
Last week I received some good news - an agency, having read my full manuscript, is interested in it. It will require more agency-assisted editing, but that too is good news; they like the novel enough to invest time in helping me make it better. And it’s a big name agency too! I’m like a jitterbug anticipating their suggestions. I took the novel as far as I could under my own steam, and while I know it’s good, at times I wondered just what it was that I had created — that can happen when you get so close to a project. Already, I have an insider’s perspective on its market genre. Wonderful.
It’s invigorating to — finally — have enthusiasm for my novel shared by someone in the business. A glimmer of hope in an morass of economic woes.
The hurdles are yet legion: pending the edits, it still has to become a formal offer of representation; the agent needs to entice a commissioning editor in a publishing house; an editor has to sell it to a pitch panel. In this business, I know only too well from my own experience that one can fall at any of the hurdles. But most are largely out of my control. The only thing I can control now is the quality of the novel, to make it the most irresistible prospect I can, and with the help of an agency, I can do even more about that.
But that is all next year’s concern.
Best of all in this is my internal victory, and the satisfaction it spawns. I have been vindicated. I took the decision to re-write a new draft, rather than start a different novel. I felt passionate about the subject matter and that I could tell the tale in a way that would sell. I believed it important also to learn to whip an errant novel into shape - it is a skill I would need as a writer. I have pulled apart and re-assembled an improved novel that made it over the next hurdle. Having done that, I feel confident that I can handle any edits that now come my way.
“Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
I’ve been sitting here in my artist’s garret this week, plotting. All that I’m missing is a white feline to stroke menacingly. I did escape my lair long enough to go see Quantum of Solace, but that is a whole different blog post. No, this is about plotting of a much less threatening kind.
In my day-time career there is a principle that transfers nicely to my shadow career of writing. In the cycle of software development, the earlier in the design process a problem is detected, or a requirement gathered, then the less costly it is to fix it or implement it. It stands to reason. If you discover towards the end of writing software code that there is a problem — something that wasn’t thought of sooner — then significant chunks of it have to be re-written, interfaces to other systems need to be altered, tests have to be run again, and man-hours spent writing the original code have to be written-off. All this affects the bottom line. That is why successful project managers on large software projects are so fastidious about requirements gathering.
So too in writing. It’s striking to me how many parallels there are between the process of writing software and the process of writing a novel. My first novel taught me the importance of having a sound plot outline before a word of prose is committed to paper (or to hard disk platter). It had to be re-drafted to repair plot deficiencies and that took a lot of my man-hours.
But, a story outline can’t be worked out totally in my head; sometimes a few scenes need to be drafted and played with to get the feel of characters, and how they might interact. There is a parallel in software for this too - it’s called a “prototype”, or a “proof of concept”. It the writing world, I think it’s called NaNoWriMo! Do something quick and dirty to see if it works, or how it works, or what the implications will be. Then take what you’ve discovered and add it to the master design.
With my second novel, I want to start similarly streamlining the writing process (insofar as a creative process can be streamlined!) If I do get to churn out novels for a living, then I’ll need to take on-board what I learnt about writing Broken Evolution and reduce the number of drafts needed to produce a novel, if I can.
So for this reason, I lock myself up in my artist’s garret, and won’t put pen to paper, or come out, until I force myself to draft a working version of the story outline. Will such anti-social behaviour turn me into Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Perhaps. I just hope it won’t be Jesse that I turn out like:
Well, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? If I can’t find fun while doing this, there’s no point doing it at all, because it’s improbable I’ll be doing it for the money (although more about that in a later post)!
Fun - that’s another thing I want to inject into this new novel. My new protagonist is going to be a bit of fiesty fun for the reader.
It’s invigorating having a blank creative slate again, after rounds of revising and tightening and editing the same story over and over to make it as refined as possible. A new novel is a fresh playground where I can go anywhere and anything is possible. That’s at the start, at least. Creativity is a process of harnessing inspiration, and slowly circumscribing it with boundaries created by the choices a writer makes.
That’s where a story outline begins - with infinite horizons. It very quickly needs to start having its wings clipped.
